How to make decisions, and stick to them

Decision making isn’t easy, especially when it has to do with important people or aspects in your life. Big decisions such as marriage, divorce, investing, buying a house, or choosing where to live can give you a few sleepless nights, or even cause serious stress. In this article, we look explore a few tips and tricks on how you can make decisions and stick to them.

Tips to ease decision making

The following tips can help make decision making a little easier for you.

a) Pretend you are advising a friend

Big decisions cloud your mind and sometimes even wreck havoc in your emotions. This all the same makes it hard to make the decision. According to the New York Times, pretending that you’re advising a close friend can help make decision making easier. The reasoning behind this is quite simple: short-term emotions cloud your judgment and get in the way of your decision making. Pretending you’re helping out a friend helps clear your mind so that you can see the right picture. Come up with a list of questions that your imaginary friend might ask, and get the best possible answers you can for them. It might take a little mental practice to perfect at first, but you’ll learn its value once you get started.

b) Avoid information overload

The more information you have in your grasp, the better placed you are to make a decision. But at a certain point, the information you get might be too much that it clouds your judgment or causes a degree of confusion. If you hit a point where you feel like you’re getting too many facts and opinions, it helps to cut some of them out so that you can avoid information overload and still make and educated decision. If you’re consulting your mentor, friends or family, keep the list small. Only narrow down your consulting to very few people that you highly trust, otherwise you’re going to have too much that even irrelevant details are going to seem important.

How to stick to your decisions

Once you’ve made a decision, how do you make sure that you stick to it? Here are a few important tips.

a) Be reluctant to change your decisions

Of course, you should give yourself permission to change your mind at any time. But you need to be very reluctant about it. Here’s why? Successful people make great decisions and are reluctant to change them. They will set clear goals and have a plan to overcome challenges that come along the way. On the other hard, many people who fail do so because they give up and look back at the first or second hurdle. So before you conclude that changing a decision you already made is the best course of action, think about whether you’re just trying to give up and run away from challenges.

b) Focus on the positive

Human beings tend to be very good at restructuring thoughts so that they can focus on the most positive experience possible within the situation. Given that almost every decision you make has a downside, the key is to happiness is to focus as little as possible on the downside.

These 4 seemingly simple tips can help you make decisions and stick to them. If you have more tips that you think work great for decision making, let us know in the comments section below.